ABSTRACT
In this part we will first discuss Xenophon’s two works, Oikonomikos and Ways and Means. These two works and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, to be discussed later, contain in large measure discussions that belong to the category of modern economics. When I say economics or economic ideas in this book, however, I include contents beyond the boundary of modern economics: namely, contents that would be considered part of ethics today. Why should we consider both the narrow and broad sense of economics, so to speak? It is because modern economics considers only how people do behave and not how people should behave in economic activities involving production, consumption, and distribution. Modern economics has tried to acquire the status of science by excluding the ethical aspect of human behavior. As a result of this, however, it has unwittingly fallen into the trap of thinking that maximization of profit and maximization of utility, hypotheses adopted to explain human behavior, were a good thing. Hausman and McPherson (1996) mention that because economists hypothesize that men constantly pursue selfish motives, people who study economics tend to become egoistic.
